Why TDD – A Question

I love TDD. I speak a lot about TDD. During these talks I tend to field a lot of questions. Occasionally someone will say “I’m just not sold on TDD” which isn’t really a question, but begs a response.

For many TDD evangelists, the response to this is to launch into a monologue of all the reasons why TDD is great and why you should use it and all the scary stuff that will happen to you (… up to and including death!) if you don’t use TDD.

This is the wrong approach to bring someone around to TDD. If they are at this point where they can say they aren’t “sold” on the idea, they probably have already heard the speech about TDD before. It didn’t move them then, why should it move them now?

That doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be addressed. But the first thing to figure out is why someone isn’t sold on TDD. So that’s what I’m doing. Now.

I’ll be working on a series of posts that (I hope) will help people see the light and drink the TDD Kool-Aid. But first I want to know what is keep you from loving TDD. Is it the process? Is it the learning curve? Is it the tooling? Help me help you.

Leave your reason in the comments below, or tweet them to me. I’ll address as many as I can in future posts.